


Within Walking Distance

by justheretobreakthings



Series: Voltron Bingo [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Dehydration, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Keith (Voltron)-centric, Pidge | Katie Holt-centric, Sick Keith (Voltron), Starvation, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 17:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15912606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justheretobreakthings/pseuds/justheretobreakthings
Summary: When the Green Lion crash-lands during a mission, Keith and Pidge have to make their journey on foot. Keith discovers that they are low on supplies, and decides to take matters into his own hands.





	Within Walking Distance

“I can’t believe it,” Pidge muttered to herself as she walked alongside the Green Lion, grounded atop the crushed remains of the dense grove of trees where it had crashed, dark and lifeless as if its battery had simply been ripped out. “I cannot fucking believe it. ‘Ooh, Voltron, we’ve got super special magical ores that you can use in weapons-building, why don’t you come down here and get them!’ But do they bother mentioning that electricity stops working near enough to the surface? No, of course not, that would just make things too easy on us!”

“Are we so sure that’s even what happened?” Keith asked. He felt awkward simply standing off to the side as Pidge did all the work of assessing the damage on Green, but there wasn’t exactly much he could do to help; his knowledge of vehicles was fairly sizeable in regards to cars and bikes back on Earth, but giant magic robot lions were way beyond his pay grade. “Maybe there was something else that brought Green down, something that was wrong with her beforehand.”

“No, I’m sure of it. Spotted some weird readings starting to pop up right before everything went kaput. It was picking up on something to do with electromagnetic interaction in this atmosphere. Didn’t have time to get too close a look at the details before everything blacked out though. Besides, our suits are down too. Can’t be a coincidence.”

“Well, any chance of getting Green back up and running any time soon?”

Pidge shook her head. “Not unless we can get her out of this atmosphere, and that’s not exactly a viable option unless you wanna lift her with our bare hands and toss her.”

Keith looked uncertainly toward the Green Lion. “So, what do we do, wait for the others to finish their missions, notice we’re gone, and come rescue us? Can’t exactly contact them with all our tech down.”

“Wouldn’t work either way,” Pidge said. “Allura and Shiro are gonna take another week or so on their mission, and we didn’t set a timeline for ours, so Hunk and Lance wouldn’t even know that there’s anything wrong if we don’t contact them when they get back and tell them so. And if they do catch on and stage a rescue, the moment they get low enough in the atmosphere, they’ll come crashing down too. Last thing we need is a dead lion pile-up out here.”

“All right then,” Keith said, crossing his arms as he cast a frustrated glance toward Green’s head, where the lights of her eyes were exasperatingly dark. “What do you suggest instead?”

“Hm. We know that electricity and electrical signals aren’t blocked altogether; if they were, no missive from this planet would have been able to reach Voltron in the first place.” Pidge paced back and forth in front of Green as she thought out loud. “We managed to get fairly close to the planet’s surface before Green went down, so maybe that’s it? Elevation? So wherever they sent the missive must be kinda high up. If we could get to the point of origin of the signal we got from the castle ship, we should be able to get in contact with them again. Then I can let them know about the planet’s atmosphere, and Hunk could get Yellow shielded against it, then come down to get us and Green. The question is, how do we get there?”

“How far is it to the signal’s point of origin?” Keith asked.

“Around eighty miles, I’d say? Give or take a few? A long way, basically.”

Keith sighed. “Then I guess we should start heading there sooner rather than later.” He made his way toward Green’s cockpit. “Your emergency supply stock is unlocked, right?”

“Hang on, you wanna leave?  _Now?”_

“Well, yeah, as good a time as any.”

“But we haven’t decided how we’re going to travel.”

“On foot.”

 _“On foot?”_  Pidge repeated incredulously.

“Look, I’m not exactly looking forward to it either, but we don’t have any other option. Our only other means of transportation is Green, and she’s down for the count. So, yeah. We’ll have to walk.”

Pidge bit her lip, turning to look toward the trees around them, presumably in the direction the signal’s origin point would be. “I… guess I could navigate it. Looked into the topography and suns’ cycles on this planet, should be enough. But God, Keith, walking? Walking  _eighty miles? Uphill?!_  Are you trying to kill us?”

“Just the opposite,” Keith called from Green’s cockpit. He located the small storage space in the cockpit, the same location as it was in Red, and knelt down to open it and look through the supplies. There was a rucksack full of first aid supplies and emergency blankets at the front, which he pulled out and set beside him before reaching for the canteens of water and packs of dehydrated food.

The moment he started pulling these out, though, he realized something was wrong. He tested the weight of the packs and canteens in his hands as he rooted through them, and they were too light, much too light. Over half of the containers seemed to be empty, and a portion of the remaining ones partially so.

What the hell? Where had the rations gone? Keith thought back, trying to think of when Pidge might have used them up. She had been on that trash nebula planet for quite a while, the one where she’d picked up those odd little creatures that had made a home in her bedroom. Likely she had eaten through a portion of her rations then, maybe even shared some with her new pets. And there’d been a couple of missions where a day trip had turned into overnight stays in the lions. But hadn’t she restocked after that?

No, probably not. When it came to anything involving computers or technology, Pidge was absolutely meticulous, keeping everything organized perfectly and having a protocol in place for every possible situation that could arise, able to write thousands and thousands of lines of code without so much as a single semicolon out of place. But as regards everything else – well, the state of her bedroom was a testament to her organizational skills in matters that didn’t involve a screen lit up in front of her.

Keith shook his head as he pulled the packs and canteens out from their store, starting to move the food rations into a spare empty rucksack. How could someone so smart still be so absent-minded?

He began redistributing the food and water, using the contents of one half-empty canteen to fill another, then doing the same with the next, trying to make the supplies take up as few containers as possible. It took him a minute to realize that Pidge was calling his name from outside.

“Hm?” Keith hummed, looking up.

“How’re we on food?”

Keith glanced down at the stock of food in his arms, trying to rapidly do the calculations in his head. Between the two of them, if they were conservative as possible with the supplies, they could make this stuff last a quintant and a half without starting to feel the negative effects of lacking food and water, maybe two quintants. That definitely wasn’t long enough to go eighty miles.

Then again, that was only if they insisted on using the supplies up at a regular rate. It wouldn’t be good for Pidge to try to cut down on food and water while they were out there, but Keith? He’d done without before. He’d had to be careful about conserving water back when he was living in his shack out in the desert, and back during his foster care years, the more neglectful homes and those more stringent with punishments had had him go a day or two without food before. It had been a while, but if absolutely necessary, it was something he could probably manage to do again.

And judging by their current supply of rations, this looked like it might be one of those necessary times.

“Keith?” Pidge called again.

“Sorry,” Keith called back, gathering the rations and water, and remembering to grab up the bag of first aid supplies and blankets before leaving. He climbed out of Green and onto the ground, slinging the food and canteens over his shoulder and tossing the rucksack of supplies to Pidge. “Yeah, we should be good to go. You know which way we’re going?”

“Got a pretty good idea,” Pidge replied with a nod. “Straight between those two suns for now, and we’re looking for a comms center at a high elevation.”

“Fantastic,” Keith said. “Well, let’s get a move on.” He turned and started marching off in the direction Pidge had indicated.

“Hang on,” Pidge said as she fell into step behind him. “You sure that’s enough supplies for the full trip? It’s gotta be about a three days’ walk.”

“Yeah, it’s fine. The food’s dehydrated, so it’s compact. Looks like less than it is.”

Pidge shrugged. “All right. There doesn’t happen to be a tent in this bag, does there?”

“Did you pack a tent in Green?”

“No.”

“There you go. I’ve got emergency blankets, that’s it.”

Pidge groaned. “God, this is gonna suck.”

And with that, they were on their way. Pidge kept up a bit of idle chatter at first, just talking about the goings-on at the castle and tossing in a few reminiscences about life back home, but it flickered out after a while. The hike was tiring, and talking was using up unnecessary energy. Neither Keith nor Pidge were great conversationalists anyway, and the silence was peaceful.

They stopped a couple of times for water breaks. Keith would slide a couple of canteens off his shoulder, hand one over to Pidge. She would gulp gratefully from hers, and Keith would take a few cautious sips from his own, just enough to keep going. Gotta be careful with it, gotta spread out his drinks if he didn’t want to wind up cutting into Pidge’s share.

Besides their exhaustion, they ran into no major obstacles along their path. Their way got steep in a few places, sure, and they found some animal tracks weaving through the forest floor starting a couple of vargas into their trip and had to keep their eyes peeled for the tracks’ owners, but never actually encountered anything. All in all, they were lucking out on the trip.

They agreed to find the clearest spot they could to make camp when the one of the suns they needed for navigation had ducked out of sight, its partner dipping low into the horizon ready to follow. Pidge spread out their blankets, and Keith trekked into the trees to gather some dry branches before he got to work setting a fire for the campsite. Pidge watched him closely, not willing to believe that Keith actually knew how to start a fire by rubbing sticks together until she actually saw it in action.

“Holy crap, man,” she said in awe as his arrangement of dead branches caught flame. “How the hell did you even know how to do that?”

“Learned,” Keith said with a shrug.

Pidge rolled her eyes. “Okay, cool, thanks for not being vague about it. Hey, toss me some of the food, will you? I want a bedtime snack.”

Keith did, and she tore open the pack and started pouring the contents into her mouth. “You gonna have any?” she asked after swallowing.

“Nah, I, uh – I ate some just a little while ago, I’m good.”

“When was that? I didn’t see you eating.”

“It was while you were on your pee break.”

“Ah. That explains it.”

Keith nodded. “So, should one of us stay up and keep watch while the other sleeps? We still don’t know if there’s anything out here. Probably shouldn’t let our guard down.”

“Oh, good, I was wondering when Mr. Paranoid was gonna stop by and visit,” Pidge said with a little smirk. “Seriously, though, sounds good. I can take first watch? Since I’m usually up pretty late anyhow and you always get up insanely early. Put our bizarre sleep schedules to good use.”

Keith nodded. “Sounds good.”

They took up their positions, Pidge on watch, Keith on the ground asleep. If there was one good thing to be said for how laborious this whole trip was, it was that it at least made it easier for him to fall asleep. He was exhausted enough that his lights were out within a minute of resting his head on the ground.

Pidge shook him awake well into the night to take his turn, and he struggled to get his eyes open through his fatigue, but he sat up, readying himself to take watch. He spared a couple of sips from the canteen, enough to get the taste of sleep out of his mouth and make his thick saliva feel a little less like paste. Then, he waited out the rest of the night, finally waking Pidge come morning.

Pidge yawned widely when she woke, and she immediately reached for the canteen as well, taking a couple of gulps before asking, “We got breakfast?”

“Bon appétit,” Keith replied, tossing another food packet her way. “I already ate, I’ll go ahead and get our camp cleared away.”

He stamped out their fire, covering it in dirt to his satisfaction before moving to roll up his emergency blanket. Pidge finished off her food before rolling up her own, and, once she was assured of the direction they were supposed to walk, they set off.

Today’s walk was just as exciting as yesterday’s had been, running into nothing that presented any real obstacle to them, instead steadfastly moving forward throughout the day.

At one point a couple of hours into the morning, Pidge had thrown her arm out in front of Keith to bring them to a halt. Her eyes darted around them suspiciously, nervously. “What is it?” Keith asked.

“Did you hear that?” Pidge said quietly.

“Hear what?”

“That growling sound,” she answered. “I think there might be an animal nearby.”

“Oh.” Keith was glad Pidge wasn’t looking at him at this moment, because he could feel himself blush as he brought a hand up to his stomach. “I, uh, I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”

Pidge turned to him then, raising a brow. “Seriously? Never thought I’d see the day when  _you’d_  think a strange sound was nothing to worry about. Didn’t you try to, like, attack Hunk once when you heard him snoring?”

“I did not attack him. I investigated the noise.”

“You brought your sword along.”

“Being armed is not the same as attacking, Pidge.”

“Oh, whatever,” Pidge said, rolling her eyes. “I’m still gonna keep an eye out, though. You can go ahead and get mauled if you wanna, I won’t stop you.”

Keith let out a huff, but Pidge had started walking again, so he didn’t bother retaliating, just followed after her.

They carried on their way, Pidge occasionally asking him to pass her a canteen, the two of them stopping once for a bathroom slash snack break. Keith didn’t make much use of it, but Pidge didn’t seem to notice. Or at least, she didn’t get onto him this time about not joining in on the food.

She was really starting to grow bored, Keith could tell, and he certainly couldn’t blame her. The walking was getting to him as well, and he was becoming more and more exhausted, the way he would back when he was at school and sitting through a particularly tedious lecture: zoning out, eyes glazing over before he snapped them back to focus, ever impatient. Not to mention a headache had started up, because of course it had.

Pidge tried after a while to find a new way to keep themselves entertained as they went along, and decided to start up some classic car games. Keith honestly didn’t particularly want to join in – all the walking was starting to make his head a little fuzzy – but he obliged for her sake. Dying of exhaustion would probably be a better way for her to go than dying of boredom. So he found himself in the middle of a round of twenty questions that was making his headache throb.

“Come on Keith,” she said, holding up two fingers. “Two questions left.”

“Okay, um,” Keith said, bring his hand up to dig the heel into his forehead. “Uh, does it, um, run on batteries?”

“Some can.” She folded one finger down. “One more.”

“Could you find it in a classroom?”

“Yes. Final guess.”

“Is it a, uh… pencil sharpener?”

“No. It was a thermocirculator.”

Keith stared at her. “How the fuck would I have ever guessed thermocirculator?”

“How the fuck did you guess pencil sharpener?” Pidge shot back.

“What classroom has a thermocirculator in it?”

“The biology labs at the Garrison do, so suck it. Your turn.”

Keith sighed and took a moment to think, his heavy, sore legs making that a somewhat difficult task. “All right, got one,” he said after a couple of minutes.

“Okay, person, place, or thing?” Pidge asked.

“Person,” said Keith.

“Is it Shiro?”

“… Thing.”

“Nope, too late, I win,” Pidge said. “God, you suck at this.”

“Come on, I switched, you can still try to guess the thing.”

“Fine. Is it the Red Lion?”

Keith scowled and dropped his head, crossing his arms over his chest. “This is a stupid game,” he mumbled.

“You’re a sore loser,” Pidge said, clambering over a thick fallen branch in their path. Keith followed her, but as he hoisted himself over, his vision went blurry in a wave of dizziness. He stumbled over the rest of the branch, barely managing to not lose his balance completely and fall right over, and he took a moment to close his eyes and take some deep breaths.

“Keith?” Pidge said. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Keith grunted, not looking up yet. His legs were starting to feel like rubber, and he could feel his heart thumping rapidly. He had no clue what that was about. When he opened his eyes, Pidge was staring at him, her face crossed with worry, so he added, “Just lost my balance for a moment. I – it’s hot out here, probably starting to get to me a bit.”

“You need to stop for a water break?” Pidge asked.

Keith sighed, but he nodded – it would definitely seem suspicious if he refused water right then. He pulled a canteen from his shoulder and took a few gulps of it before capping it again. It was enough to satisfy Pidge, so she turned around and continued leading them on their way, Keith falling into step behind her and swallowing back the nausea that the water had brought.

They kept up their trek for the remainder of the day just as they had the day before, stopping to camp only when they were running low on sunlight. Pidge took first watch, and when she shook Keith awake for his turn, waking up seemed like the most difficult thing he had ever done in his life. He felt like his body weighed about a ton as he got up off the ground, and he could feel himself shaking. He wasn’t shaking enough that Pidge would notice, though, so long as he kept moving once she was up.

Pidge was confident that they had been walking long enough that the communications center they were looking for couldn’t be too much farther away, so she was in high spirits when they set out again. Keith was too focused on staying upright to respond.

Pidge suggested I Spy to pass the time today, but Keith declined. He was pretty sure he’d get even dizzier than he already was if he tried looking all around for things Pidge saw, but the reasoning he gave Pidge was that there wasn’t much around them besides trees. So she went with the alphabet game instead. Keith definitely would have preferred if she had just picked the Quiet Game. His voice was growing dry from trying to keep up conversation, and he was started to have a bit of trouble hearing Pidge. Her voice would fade in an out, like someone was slowly turning the volume dial back and forth, non-stop.

At least he wasn’t feeling as hot now as he was earlier.

About a varga after they’d had their – Pidge’s – food break, Pidge grasped Keith’s arm and pointed into the distance up the hill they were climbing. “Keith, you see that?” she asked.

Keith squinted, trying to focus. “See what?”

“That building there! See that corner sticking out, there at the top! That’s gotta be the comms center! We’re so close!”

“That’s – that’s great.”

Pidge grinned at him. “Race you to the top?” she asked.

“What?”

But Pidge had already taken off. With a groaned, Keith clambered off after her, his legs and his armor feeling heavier than ever. He tripped and stumbled at one point, and his world seemed to sway, lurching off-center. In the distance he could see Pidge through the tree branches, having turned back to him, probably stopping when she’d noticed that the fastest person on the team suddenly could not keep up with her in a race. “You okay?” she called.

Keith couldn’t answer. He leaned his hand against the trunk of a nearby tree, pausing to take heavy, panting breaths that did nothing to ease the dryness in his mouth. Vaguely he was aware of Pidge saying something else to him, but he didn’t bother trying to decipher her words – all his mental energy was currently focused entirely on keeping himself standing upright.

“Keith?” he could finally make out through the fog pressing against his skull, and he looked up wearily to see Pidge’s blurred face spinning in front of him. She must have come back. “Keith?” she repeated, and her voice echoed dimly in his head. “What’s going on?”

He opened his mouth to respond, but no words came out, so he tried shaking his head instead. Bad idea. The moment he did so, another wave of dizziness crashed over him and the edges of his vision started to darken. Distantly he sensed that his hand was no longer holding the rest of him up against the tree trunk, and that was all he could note before he faded entirely.

* * *

 

The instant Keith started going down, Pidge darted back toward him, her concern replaced with outright fear. “Keith!” she shouted, shoving branches aside to reach him and rolling his prone figure onto its back.

“Keith!” she called again, shaking him by the shoulders. His eyes cracked open blearily, but they were completely unfocused and fell shut again after a few seconds.

She ripped off her glove and pressed her hand to his flushed forehead, testing for fever. He did seem a warm, but then again, that might have just been from being outside in the relative heat and walking for days on end. She was exhausted too, had the stench and the sweat to show for it –

She paused, staring at her hand where it rested on Keith’s forehead as she realized something odd. His skin was bone-dry. Normally at the end of a long training session, Keith would be pretty much drenched, face glistening with a layer of sweat and hair plastered to his forehead and neck. He should have been in that sort of state now, like Pidge was.

How long had he not been sweating?

She supposed that the ‘how long’ didn’t matter as much as simply the fact that he was dry  _now_ , and she knew what that meant.

Cursing herself for not having noticed earlier, before Keith had wound up passed out from dehydration, Pidge shuffled around him to tug one of the canteens away from where it was slung over his shoulder. She noticed its light weight and shook it in her hand, and, when she heard nothing inside, spat out some more curses and tossed it aside, reaching for another. She tested a few more canteens that seemed to be just as empty, before finally hearing liquid sloshing around in the last one.

“All right, Keith,” she muttered, uncapping the canteen moving around him to prop him up. “Come on, drink up, let’s get some water in you.”

Keith still barely cracked his eyes open, but he appeared to be just conscious enough to know that he needed to swallow, since he did just that. Pidge sighed in relief as Keith gulped down the water, only stopping when it was empty.

“Okay,” she said, “Okay, we’re okay, we just have to – ”

She stopped when Keith lurched away from her, stiffening and letting out a strained belch. He shuddered for a few seconds before he lurched again, this time horking up a large globule of translucent vomit.

Pidge watched in horror, only just now remembering that you’re not supposed to let a dehydrated person drink too much water too quickly. She swore under her breath again as she rubbed at Keith’s back, the latter weakly coughing up the rest of the water, wanting to kick herself for having just made things worse. As much as it revolted her to look at it, she couldn’t help but glance at the vomit, and she realized when she did that it was clear. Just water, no food.

Oh, God, Keith being dehydrated and overheating were bad enough, but now adding starvation to the mix…

Pidge’s breaths came fast, and her head was spinning in a panic. Keith was sick. Keith was sick, and Pidge was the only one around, and they were out of rations, and the last of their water had just been wasted, so she could neither give him anything to drink nor cool him down, and the communications center they were looking for was  _so fucking close_ , but not close enough for Keith to walk – even as his retching was subsiding, he had collapsed onto the ground again, only one shaking elbow keeping him propped up, so it was unlikely he’d be able to walk any distance at all right now – and  _definitely_  not close enough for Pidge to drag him. If she had been Hunk or Shiro, she probably could have carried Keith, but as it was, she was stuck.

She chewed at her lip and wrung her hands nervously as she looked down at Keith. Keith couldn’t leave on his own power, and she couldn’t bodily move him anywhere, but she could still go. Get to the communications center as fast as she could, get someone to come back with her, bring water and maybe some food along or some kind of medical equipment – or would that slow them down to much? Would they have to come back to comms center first before treating him? Pidge didn’t know which would be quicker.

Whatever. The people at the comms center probably knew, and she was wasting time. And as much as she hated to leave Keith behind, it didn’t look like she had any other choice.

She slung her rucksack to the ground, fishing through it to pull out the first-aid kit. There wasn’t much in it that would be useful here – no water or food packets or, like, refrigerator, but there was an ice pack at least. She snapped it between her hands and tucked it under Keith’s neck where he lay on the ground and she rolled him onto his back. “I’m so sorry, I’ve got to leave,” she said softly. “I swear, I’ll be right back, okay? I’ll be right back.”

She straightened up and started to sprint, praying that luck would hold enough that Keith would be all right as she fetched help. The forest seemed to have little by way of wildlife, and she had an innate knack for navigation and directions, so she knew she wouldn’t lose track of Keith’s location.

But still, thinking of the way Keith had looked when she’d left, prone and exhausted and practically unmoving…

Pidge shook the image out of her head and forced her legs to move even faster.

Ten minutes in when she was heaving for breath and had a stitch in her side that felt like a knife through the ribs, her suit started working again, the soft electrical hum alerting her before she saw the lights come on and felt the cooling system kick in. “Great timing,” she growled at it, but at least the fact that it was working meant she’d been right about the elevation, and she was close to her destination. And having the suit powered on again made the last five minutes of her run easier than her first ten.

She burst through the entryway the moment she reached the communications center, slamming the door against the wall and then leaning against the doorway, gasping for breath. The room’s occupants turned to look at her. The place looked a bit like a simplified version of a mission control room back at the Garrison, and the aliens here were more or less humanoid in shape, but boxier and with scute-armored skin like an armadillo’s and orange eyes at least twice the size of a human’s.

One of the aliens, seated at a console at the far end of the room, stood upon her entrance. “Ah, paladin of Voltron,” he said. “You’re late.”

“ _Yeah,”_  Pidge snarled through her heaving breaths.  _“I know.”_

“Is something wrong?” the alien asked lightly.

Pidge fixed him with the heaviest glower she could muster. God, and she thought  _Keith_  was bad at reading people.

Speaking of whom –

“Are you the one who sent the missive out to Voltron?” she bit out.

“I am, yes,” the alien answered with a nod. “Broniff. Pleased to meet – ”

“Well, thanks a lot for warning us about the fucking atmosphere! I crashed my ship, we had to walk for days to get here, and now another paladin of Voltron is out there without food or water and he could wind up  _dying_  if we don’t get a fucking move on!”

There was a pause as her words echoed throughout the room. “I see,” Broniff eventually said. “Apologies. But what do you want us to do?”

“I want you to come retrieve him so we can start getting him healed! Come on, if you’ve got any water or anything cold, bring that too, just get moving,  _now!”_

Broniff frowned uncertainly at her. “We are a communications center,” he said. “Not a hospital.”

“And you’re not gonna be  _either_  if you don’t get off your asses right this fucking minute and help my friend!” Pidge shouted, whipping her bayard out and brandishing it threateningly. Broniff took a step back and eyes widened all over the room. It was a smart move on Allura’s part, Pidge realized at the back of her mind, to have sent her and Keith on a supply-dealing mission rather than a diplomatic one; this sort of threat probably wouldn’t have gone over well at a royal dinner party.

But it did its job, got the aliens up and moving, a couple grabbing bottles as they left, and Pidge led the way, shoving aside her exhaustion from before and focusing only on getting back to Keith. The aliens didn’t all follow – she hadn’t expected them to – but enough came along that they’d be able to haul Keith back to the comms center no problem.

Her leaden legs were ready to collapse from all the sprinting by the time they reached Keith, so she let herself drop to the forest floor, apprehensively checking his pulse. She hadn’t expected him to have died while she was gone, but she still couldn’t stop herself from feeling dizzy with relief when she could detect it.

The other aliens had clamored around Keith as well, before Pidge reminded them to give him air, and one who had brought a bottle along reached it out to give Keith a drink, but Pidge snatched it from them and lifted Keith’s head to pour it herself, being extra careful this time to only give him a couple of small sips, not let him drink too fast. The aliens were talking to her, asking questions, and she answered what she could. One of them mentioned something about heatstroke, which wouldn’t have surprised Pidge at all, and it wasn’t long before two of the aliens were lifting Keith up between them and starting back toward the center.

One who lingered behind asked if Pidge needed help getting up as well. “No,” she answered, before trying to push herself off the ground only to discover that her legs now seemed to weigh a few thousand pounds each. “…Yes,” she said, and the alien hauled her up onto their back and made to follow the others.

They didn’t have much by way of means to help Keith feel comfortable back at the comms center, but the aliens did their best – whether out of concern for the red paladin or fear of the green one’s bayard, Pidge didn’t know, but as long as something was being done, the motivations didn’t really matter. Keith had started shifting a little in unrest, but still hadn’t wakened, when she’d entered a room that could have been a break room, could have been a storage room, to find two of the aliens setting him down across a row of chairs, and another was bringing water in.

Pidge supervised, ensuring that the aliens knew how much water to give him and the fact that they needed to keep him cool, before she turned to Broniff. “You sent the missive, so you’d be able to get in touch with Voltron, right?”

“That’s correct,” Broniff said. “And you were expected to arrive over two quintants ago, you know. The mining corporation who extended the offer of their metals were waiting for – ”

“Yeah, that’s actually kinda taken a backseat now,” Pidge interrupted. “I’m not negotiating any rock prices until my friend’s better, and that’s gonna happen a lot quicker if you get me Voltron on the line.”

Broniff huffed, clearly miffed at her tone, but he led the way to one of the consoles to open a line with the Castle of Lions. It took a few minutes, minutes that Pidge spent tapping her fingers anxiously against Broniff’s seat, earning her dirty looks from the alien which she pointedly ignored, but eventually Coran’s face appeared in the screen. “Coran!” Pidge cried. “Thank God, it’s good to see you.”

“Number five,” Coran said with a nod, “I take it negotiations on that ore have – ”

“No, no, we never got to them,” Pidge cut him off. “Is Hunk around? We’re gonna need him.”

“Right here, Pidge!” Hunk’s voice called, and a few ticks later he appeared in the screen next to Coran. “Do you need all of us? Coran and I were working on some maintenance here on the bridge, so Lance took a nap, but I can go get him.”

“No, it’s fine, don’t bother. Look, I’m going to have Broniff send you the specs on this planet’s atmosphere and electromagnetic fields, and then I need you two to get Yellow shielded up so Hunk can come in for an extraction, and make it soon.”

Coran and Hunk both stared at her. “Wait, what?” said Hunk.

Pidge let out a breath through her nose. “We need you to pick us up. Green’s out crash-landed in the forest about eighty miles northeast of here and we can’t get her back up and running until – ”

“Wait, you crashed Green?” Hunk asked.

“Yes, but it wasn’t my fault! There’s something all messed up in the atmosphere in this planet; the moment we got close enough to the surface, everything electrical just went kaput. This spot is one of the only places where communications tech actually work.”

“What?” Coran said. He turned to Broniff. “Why were we not informed of this before you asked us for an audience at your planet?”

“I had thought you already knew,” Broniff replied calmly.

Pidge rolled her eyes and nudged the alien aside to take full control of the camera and screen. “Look, doesn’t matter, okay?  _Now_  we know, and we can do something about it. Broniff can give you all the info you need, and you guys can get Yellow ready and get down here and grab Green and pick up me and Keith. Coran, how long do you think that will take?”

“We’ve got plenty of shielding technology on the castle to work with,” Coran answered. “Depending on what’s actually in the atmosphere causing this problem, we might be able to get something together within a few vargas.”

“Fine, just get to work on getting Yellow set up and get down here ASAP, all right? However fast that is!”

“All right, all right, Pidge,” Coran said. “Why the urgency?”

“Because Keith is sick!” Pidge snapped.

“Keith is – ” Coran started to repeat.

“Sick, yes! And we need to get him back to castle and to the med bay, and soon!”

Hunk let out a little sound almost like a whine. “Man, don’t bury the lede like that! What’s wrong with him?” he asked, his signature worry dripping from his voice.

“He’s dehydrated. Badly. Someone here said probably heat exhaustion too, and – and it doesn’t look like he’s eaten a thing in the past couple of days.”

“ _What?!_  Why – why hasn’t he been eating or drinking?”

“Because he’s a fucking idiot, I don’t know! Just get Yellow down here so we can  _fix it_ , okay?!”

“Right, right, Roger that,” Hunk said, nodding vigorously. They gave no parting salutation before Coran turned off the screen, and that was fine by Pidge. At least it meant they were getting started quick.

Now all that was left to do was wait, and Pidge had never been good at waiting. She took to pacing for a while, before realizing that she was way too tired and sore to keep that up for the next few vargas, so instead she planted herself in a chair, arms crossed, glaring down at the floor when she wasn’t watching Keith at the other side of the room. She didn’t get up to sit next to him until he roused, and that wasn’t until another too-fast gulp of water sent him into hacking coughs that managed to fully wake him.

Pidge rubbed her hand in circles on his back as he groaned and tried to regain his breath, and she mumbled assurances that Hunk would be here soon, and Coran would get him all fixed up, and they just had to wait, but it was hard to convey the right tone when she was waiting so impatiently herself. Yes, patience is a virtue, but Pidge had never thought of herself as particularly virtuous.

And Keith and Shiro always had that ‘patience yields focus’ mantra, but she didn’t need to focus on anything right now. She just had to wait.

When Hunk finally came onto her now-working comms to let her know he and Yellow were nearly there, she could have melted in relief. But instead she supervised as one of the aliens helped Keith up to half-walk out to the lion, and she took over once they’d reached the ramp leading into Yellow’s jaw.

Hunk smiled warmly when they entered, although he couldn’t keep the worry out of his eyes when he looked at Keith, who was leaning against Pidge like she was the only thing keeping him upright. “How you holding up, buddy?” he asked.

Keith mumbled something incoherent as Pidge lowered the two of them to the floor to sit up against the wall. Hunk didn’t ask anything else, just took off to go retrieve Green. And after the long trek it had taken Pidge and Keith to get from Green’s crash site to the communications center, the trip back at Yellow’s speed seemed to take no time at all.

Keith had fallen asleep again, with his heading lolling onto Pidge’s shoulder, by the time Hunk scooped Green up in Yellow’s mouth and announced to Coran that they were heading back to the Castle. Once he finished that, he glanced back toward Pidge and Keith. “How’s he doing?” he asked.

“He’s hanging in there,” Pidge answered. She nudged Keith’s head back into place on her shoulder as it threatened to roll off.

“So, what – what happened? I mean, you said he wasn’t eating or drinking, but, I mean, have you figured out why yet?”

Pidge wracked her mind, her thoughts finally landing on the empty canteens Keith had been carrying when he’d passed out, and a grim weight settled in her stomach. “I think I can guess,” she mumbled. “I think – I think he might have been trying to conserve supplies.”

“What?”

“He told me we were fine on rations, but I never actually checked for myself. And – and he said he was eating and drinking and everything, and I didn’t think I had any reason to doubt him, so…”

“So he was lying?”

“Seems like it,” Pidge sighed.

“But… why?”

Pidge just shook her head, but the question occupied her thoughts all the way up until they had made it back to the Castle.

Pidge had hoped that when they got back, they would be able to put Keith in a healing pod and be done with it, get everything back to normal, but Coran had to remind her that the pods were for treating injuries. And Keith wasn’t injured, aside from the sorts of minor cuts and bruises he and Pidge had both sustained from marching through a forest for days, so his recovery had to be done the old-fashioned way.

This meant a slow and ongoing process consisting of carefully measured and timed meals and drinks, strict sleep schedules, cool baths and constant thermostat adjustments, and constant mother-henning from both Coran and Hunk. Hunk seemed to take Keith going days without food as a personal offense, and was determined to ensure that Keith was back up to eating normally again soon, while Coran kept tedious notes on his food and water intake and couldn’t go a varga without checking his temperature.

Lance, after getting over his bitterness about the fact that neither Coran nor Hunk had thought to tell him about what was going on until after he’d woken up from his long nap on his own, had offered to supervise Keith and make sure he didn’t overexert himself while he was supposed to be resting up, an offer that Keith had turned down immediately. He’d let Shiro take the job, though, once he and Allura returned from their own mission, and Lance had insisted, with a scowl, that he hadn’t wanted to do it anyway. No one but Keith believed him.

Pidge, for her part, stayed out of the way.

She avoided the med bay like it was toxic, and took her meals and snacks in the kitchen when they didn’t overlap with the mealtimes Hunk had scheduled for Keith to get him back to regularity. And about a movement into his recovery, when he rejoined the other paladins in the lounge for the first time, she remembered some coding she needed to do and left immediately for her room.

Every time she looked at Keith, she would get a glimpse of that overheated, dried-out, retching version of Keith that had passed out on the forest floor, and she didn’t want to see that. Seeing that pissed her off.

She managed to avoid pretty much all interaction with Keith at all up until the day when, right after she had sat down with her lunch and started to eat, Keith had entered the kitchen too, going for the cabinets. “What are you doing here?” she asked sharply.

Keith raised a brow at her. “Eating.”

“I thought your lunch had just finished, like, ten minutes ago.”

Keith shook his head. “We’re moving away from Hunk’s schedule a bit. He’s letting me eat without a babysitter today.” He opened the fridge, pulled out a plate with clear wrap over it, and walked to the table. “Mind if I sit?” he asked. Pidge didn’t answer, and he sat.

The two of them set to eating, neither saying a word to the other. Pidge kept her eyes pointedly on her food, shoveling it up as fast as she could without getting sick or appearing suspicious. Keith ate much slower, still taking the small bites Hunk had instructed for him, and he was watching Pidge. Even without looking at him Pidge could feel his eyes on her. A couple of times, he took a breath as if he were about to say something, but didn’t.

“Are you… mad at me?” Keith finally managed to ask when the silence had stretched to the point where the awkwardness was almost suffocating.

Pidge snorted, looking up at him for the first time since the meal had started. “Am I? Wonder why that might be.”

Keith frowned, furrowing his brow. “You haven’t talked to me in, well, a while. Did – did I do something?”

With an exasperated sigh, Pidge slapped her spork down onto the table. Well, he’s the one who asked. Might as well have this talk. “Are you seriously asking this? You  _seriously_  can’t figure out why I might be a little  _upset_ with you?!”

“Um…”

Pidge slapped her hand against the table. “You didn’t think I’d be a little upset with you about what happened after Green went down? About how you, you know, lied about the rations and went and starved yourself and scared me half to death?”

“Oh. You’re mad about that?”

_“Yes, I’m fucking mad about that!”_

Keith sighed and set his spork down. “Okay, look, I know things didn’t end so great, but I wasn’t trying to scare you or upset you or anything. Honest. I was just trying to – we didn’t have a whole lot of rations, see. So, I took less than I usually would so they would last the whole trip. End of story.”

“No,  _not_ end of story!” Pidge spat. “Why the fuck did you not tell me about the rations?”

Keith hesitated. “Well, I, uh – ”

“We could have done something! We could have looked for a river or a spring or something! We could have gone hunting or foraging for food! We didn’t  _have_  to only rely on those rations!”

“Or maybe we did,” Keith said. “We might not have found any water, and we don’t know what plants or animals would have been safe to eat.”

“Then we would have figured out something else! Come on, I’m the guardian spirit of nature, and you lived alone in a desert for a year. We’re practically built for survivalism! We could have managed something! I mean, if you had actually  _told me there was a problem_ , then we could have solved it!”

Keith sighed. “Pidge, I just didn’t want you to have to worry, okay? I did it for - ”

“You’d better not say you did it for me.”

“But I did.”

Pidge slammed her hand against the table. “I didn’t ask you to do that!”

Keith huffed, a strand of his bangs fluttering against his forehead. “Well, yeah, you wouldn’t have. You didn’t need to.”

“Didn’t  _need_  to?”

“Yeah, I mean, I – I would’ve – ”

“You would have starved and dehydrated yourself either way? That’s just the automatic Plan A in your head?”

Keith just shrugged in answer.

“Keith,” Pidge said sharply. She leaned across the table and looked intently at him. Keith glanced down, never one who had much of a knack for maintaining eye contact, but Pidge was undeterred. “What if I had been the one who found out about the low rations, and I had decided to starve and dehydrate myself for  _your_  sake? Would you have liked that?”

“…No,” Keith admitted after a few seconds’ hesitation. “But - ”

“But nothing. If you’d be upset with me ‘protecting’ you that way, then you should assume the same goes for vice versa.”

“Wha– Pidge, I don’t need protecting!”

“Neither do I!”

Keith opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out, so he stuck to scowling at Pidge instead. Pidge scowled back, and they stayed that way until Pidge finally let her expression drop and slumped into her seat with a sigh. “You know Matt?” she asked. “My brother?”

“Uh, yeah?” Keith said, raising his eyebrow at the non sequitur.

“He broke his leg once.”

“… Is that the whole story?”

Pidge glared agin. “No, it’s not the whole story, shut up. It was - it was a couple years before Matt got accepted into the Garrison. The two of us had been walking home from my elementary school. We lived, like, three blocks from it, and Matt’s junior high was just another another two blocks over, so we always walked together when neither of us had any after-school thing going on. Anyway, we were walking home, and some idiot from the high school had made a sharp turn onto the same street as us on a moped, wound up skidding onto the sidewalk, because, like I said, this guy was an idiot. Matt spotted him coming like a second before I did, so all of a sudden he jumps up next to me to shield me or something, and the next thing I know, the guy’s back wheel catches Matt’s leg, and he takes Matt down with him when his moped topples over.”

She picked up her spork and was quiet for a few ticks as she stabbed idly at the food goo on her plate before continuing. “He broke his leg in three places. Some old lady on the street who’d been looking out the window or something called nine-one-one, Matt got the whole shebang, big old plaster cast and crutches and everything. And he kept cracking jokes the whole time; I don’t even remember what the jokes were, I’d just been too focused on freaking out because – because Matt shouldn’t have been there. He shouldn’t have been in the path of the moped at all. I was there. I could’ve taken the hit.”

“Pidge,” Keith said slowly, “Come on, he’s your big brother. You can’t blame him for being protective of you. And you would have gotten hurt if he hadn’t, so – ”

“Yeah, that was his logic too. He was real insistent that he was just doing his noble duty as the older sibling, and that it wasn’t a big deal. But you know what?” She let out a deep breath. “It  _was_  a big deal. Because for the whole two months that he had that stupid cast on, all I could ever think about was the fact that he didn’t  _have_  to have broken his leg. If he’d just left things as they were, then, sure, I would’ve been the one to wind up with the broken leg, but the net result is still basically the same: one person who broke their leg and one who didn’t. And Matt was closer to the moped guy by jumping between us like he did, so I wouldn’t have even taken as direct a hit if it’d been me he’d run into.

“And, God, it kinda pissed me off. Matt kept brushing it off like, oh, it’s fine, no biggie, but I know it wasn’t fine. I’d heard him complaining to Mom and Dad about how frustrating it was to bathe and stuff with that cast on and how bad it itched and how sore his arms were from the crutches. And he had to miss out on a full season of soccer, and meanwhile I didn’t even play any sports. But every time I’d try to talk to him about it, he’d just grin and say everything was fine, that’s what big brothers are for, he’s just glad I was okay. And I hated it. I didn’t like post-noble-sacrifice Matt and I wished so bad that just once he’d actually, like, get mad at me. Get frustrated. Ask me why I couldn’t have just moved out of the way of the fucking moped myself. You know, make me feel like a little less of an idiot for asking  _myself_  that all the time.”

“I don’t want to be protected, Keith. Not if you’ve gotta get hurt in order to protect me. I would much rather just take the bullet than feel horrible after someone else takes it for me.”

“Pidge, I – I can’t promise – I mean, we’re a team, we’re supposed to protect each other.”

Pidge rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Like  _you_  wouldn’t be upset if one of the others went and hurt themselves for your sake. Quick English lesson, Keith: when you say ‘each other’, that means it has to go  _both_  ways. Which means you gotta be just as okay with me protecting you as you are with protecting me. And I know that’s not even close to being true.”

Keith frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’ve seen the things you do in training and on missions. The way you act. We all have. I’ve seen you put more focus on guarding Shiro from training bots than guarding yourself, I’ve seen you run out into crossfire like it’s nothing, seen you throw yourself on us like a human shield. You don’t even give us a chance to protect you. It’s like heroic sacrifice is always your first instinct.”

Keith squirmed in his seat, and he didn’t meet Pidge’s eyes when he responded. “Look, I’m not trying to martyr myself or anything, and I don’t - I don’t  _want_  to be hurt or to… you know…”

“Die?”

“Yeah. But, well, if there’s a situation where it looks like one of the paladins is going to have to take the hit or get left behind or something, doesn’t it make the most sense for it to be me?”

Pidge blinked at him. “What the fuck are you – ? No, of course it doesn’t.”

“It does. Think about it. All of the rest of you are kinda irreplaceable. Shiro’s the leader, no question about that. You’re the tech expert, and not even the Galra army can match your skill with computers. Hunk’s the engineer, and we wouldn’t be able to get half the things in the hangar or armory working without him. Lance is the sharpshooter - and Coran also said a while back that he’s the source of team morale. Me? I can fly, and I can fight. But we  _all_  can fly, and we  _all_  can fight, so it’s not like you couldn’t get on just the same without me doing it.” He took a deep breath and lowered his gaze. “I’m just trying to be practical here. Think about what would be the smallest loss.”

For a moment Pidge could do nothing but stare at him, jaw agape. Then, she shook her head and said, “Keith, just know that I’m asking this not to be mean, but as a concerned friend: are you out of your fucking mind?”

Keith’s face fell into a glare. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, in what universe do you think you’d be a small loss? No, no, let me talk,” she said, lifting her hand as Keith opened his mouth to object. “First of all, yeah, sure, we can all fight and fly, but not like you. Shiro’s the only one who can match you when it comes to fighting, and as for flying? None of us hold a candle to you. They kept your high scores up at the Garrison even after you were expelled, and they made all the other pilots look like total chumps. And next time we need to go darting through an asteroid field, who do you think is gonna be able to get through it besides you, huh? Me? Hunk? Fuck off.”

“Yeah, but – ”

“And let’s say, for sake of the argument, that you absolutely sucked as a paladin. That you couldn’t pilot for shit and you couldn’t beat a piñata in a fight. Guess what? I still wouldn’t wanna see you go up in flames in battle. We like having you around, believe it or not.”

Keith stared at her. “Wait… what?”

“Yeah. I mean, you’re the only one whose presence I can stand when I just need some peace and quiet, since you don’t, like, talk much – and sometimes that’s nice, sometimes I just like having someone around to be quiet with. And Shiro just thinks you’re the light of his life, you know, the little brother following in his footsteps that he’s just oh so damn proud of. And you’re the only one who will ever eat Coran’s cooking, which is a ridiculous superpower but it makes his day. And I don’t think Lance would work half as hard as he does in training if you weren’t around for him to try and show up, so you’re, like, a good influence on him or something.”

“Oh…” Keith said. His expression was blank.

Pidge raised a brow at him. “Come on, you seriously didn’t think we liked having you here?”

“I… I dunno.”

She frowned. “Well… we do. And none of us want to see you wind up hurt, or worse. Friends don’t let friends sacrifice themselves for stupid reason.”

“I just never…” Keith said carefully, “I never thought you – I mean, I’m not very good at – at being able to tell if – I figured you just kind of, thought of me… as your teammate, but, like that’s it. Not – not someone you would – I thought I kinda, you know… bothered you guys, or something…”

“So does Lance, but we still keep him around.”

Keith cracked a tiny hint of a smile. “I’m gonna tell him you said that.”

“Do it,” Pidge replied with a shrug. “I own my words. But seriously, Keith. I –  _we_  – care about you. And you can’t scare us like that, okay? I mean it. None of us want to watch you go through hell attempting to protect us.”

Keith winced. “Look, I get the sentiment, but, I mean – you can’t expect me to never get hurt in battles or anything. Or to not want to see you guys stay safe too.”

Pidge drummed her fingers against the table. “Okay, then, let me phrase this another way. I don’t want you to put yourself through hell  _for_  us. I want you to put yourself through hell  _with_  us.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Look, Keith, I get it, we’re at war, so people are gonna get hurt, there are losses, all that junk. But we’re a team now, right? That means we’re supposed to get to protect you as much as you try and protect us. More, probably, considering how much you seem to love throwing yourself into the line of fire.”

Keith took in a breath. “Pidge – ”

“And it  _also_  means,” Pidge cut him off, “That we split the risk. Okay? Next time we’re low on supplies, I don’t give a fuck who you think ‘deserves’ it more or whatever, it’s gonna be split dead even. It’s how teams work. Sharing is caring.”

She stood up and pushed her chair back, picking her plate up off of the table. “Hopefully there won’t be a next time, but if there is, I don’t want it to end up going the same way this one did. We’re equals, we protect each other equally, that’s the end of it. ‘Bout time you retired your little lone wolf persona and embraced the pack. We’re teammates, yeah?” She held up her fist, and Keith stared at it. “Oh my God, Keith, you’re supposed to punch it, how do you not know – ”

“I know what a fist bump is!” Keith said, demonstrating said fist bump irritably. “Just wasn’t sure that’s what you were going for.”

“Uh-huh. But do we have a deal? You’re gonna stop playing noble hero and trying to protect us at every turn?”

“I – I can’t promise – ”

“You can try, at least. Promise you’ll try.”

Keith slowly managed to meet Pidge’s hopeful smile. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. I can try.”


End file.
